Kip Jones

KIP JONES, an American by birth, has been studying and working in the UK for more than 19 years. Under the umbrella term of 'arts-based research', his main efforts have involved developing tools from the arts and humanities for use by social scientists in research and its impact on a wider public or a Perfomative Social Science.

Jones is Reader in Performative Social Science and Director of the Centre for Qualitative Researchat Bournemouth University. Kip has produced films and written many articles for academic journals and authored chapters for books on topics such as masculinity, ageing and rurality, and older LGBT citizens. His ground-breaking use of qualitative methods, including biography and auto-ethnography, and the use of tools from the arts in social science research and dissemination are well-known.

Jones acted as Author and Executive Producer of the award-winning short film, RUFUS STONE, funded by Research Councils UK. The film is now available for free viewing on the Internet and has been viewed by more than 13,000 people in 150 countries.

Areas of expertise• Close relationships, culture and ethnicity• Social psychology, sociology• Ageing, self and identity• Interpersonal processes, personality, individual differences, social networks, prejudice and stereotyping• Sexuality and sexual orientation• Creativity and the use of the arts in Social Science

Media experienceHis work has been reported widely in the media, including:BBC Radio 4,BBC TV news,Times Higher Education, Sunday New York Times, International Herald-Tribune and The Independent.

Thursday, 22 June 2017

"Peformative Social Science: What it is, What it isn't" Revisited

University academics and managerial types alike seem to be awash these days with ideas of 'creativity' as some new miracle tool, and play as a key component to engagement. They bring together academics and convince them that playing with toys, colouring in, and tickling their toes with mud will somehow produce what has been lacking in their scholarship. New buzz words are shared. Everyone goes home happy.

Wrong.

What is sometimes called 'arts-based research' is none of these. If anything (and those who have really engaged with using tools from the arts to discover knowledge and to disseminate their findings are well aware), an approach using the arts in research takes about twice the time and effort.

Performative Social Science (PSS) is an arts-led approach that has been developed over more than ten years at Bournemouth University, It has been written about in journals and books, and demonstrated in a variety of examples such as online graphic publication, film production, and new fiction writing. PSS in philosophically grounded in Relational Aesthetics and Relational Art which take into account the viewer/participant as key to its approach. (I have written at length on the development of Performative Social Science.)

What follows is a much earlier piece that was developed for a seminar at Bournemouth University. I was beginning to grapple at the time with both the joys and problems thrown up by my turn to the creative, the arts, and the fictive in representing social science research. I present that essay here as a alternative to the buzz words and play dates becoming common place in academic circles these days.

“Performative Social Science: What it is, What it isn't”

Seminar script

Kip Jones

Seminar presented at Bournemouth University, 13 October, 2010

Publish or perish drives much of academic life. It has its origins in hard sciencewhere the first to get an experiment, finding or theory into publication won the prize.Other academic disciplines followed suit by imitating this system. This structure hasdeveloped a style of academic writing and a vetting process that are both by nowantiquated and suspect.

We are all caught up in this bind from time to time, me included. Fortunately,publishing is evolving and, more and more, supplementary multi-media are requestedas part of the publication procedure. Audience share and economics drives most ofthese changes, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a good time to take advantage of thisexpansion of the opportunities for academic outputs.

Qikipedia recently cautioned on Twitter: “About 200,000 academic journals arepublished in English. The average number of readers per article is five. Funders arenow looking for outcomes from their investments that demonstrate how we will affectchange in the wider world, i.e., the world beyond the very few other academics whohappen to read a journal article. This climate of flux presents opportunities to get theproducts of our alternative methods of dissemination of social science data to wideraudiences—to popularize research. This is why I now revisit one of my early cracks ataudio/visual script writing and production, “The One about Princess Margaret” heretoday.

Why popularize research?

Personally, one result of the current academic climate is that I am less interestedin writing that does not communicate directly with an audience and include my “self”in that narrative. Somewhat reluctantly at first, therefore, I began to explore auto-ethnography and its potential for more personal communication with an audience andthe platforms that I might use in order to reach that audience. I realized that all Ireally have to share with anyone else is my own experience. It may be flawed and/orof little value to anyone else. For these reasons, I try to write and produce for variousmedia in a way that will be of some use to others in their own work. I attempt toaccomplish this with some skill and craft—to “popularize it” at the same time. Thenatural follow-up for me was to revisit the arts and humanities for potential tools thatmight enrich this transition.

Filmmaker, Jean Luc Godard is often credited with having once said, "It's notwhere you take things from—it's where you take them to” (BoingBoing 2010). In mybest auto-ethnography, I am actually a minor character and/or a conduit to a time,place and other people. I become fictionalized through writing. I am the sorcerer whoreminds audiences of their selves. In terms of visual representation of such stories, Ibecome a keen observer of lives, allowing cultural images to become private andiconic. These remembered images twist and turn and eventually morph in variousways to be included as my own graphic memories. These visual ‘mash-ups’ are trulyEthno-Graphic. Indeed, our visual memories can become imbued with both intensecultural and personal meaning. This is the visual auto-ethnography that I hope torepresent in my work.

Along with exploring visualizations of research data over the past ten years orso, I have also experimented with writing performatively, or rather, representing intext what I am trying to accomplish imaginatively. Several examples include theresults of an interview with Mary Gergen; the script for an audio/visual productionabout Klaus Riegel and Kenneth Gergen; a very early piece about Akira Kurosawaand Gerotranscendence; and, of course, the script for “The One about PrincessMargaret”.

I think it is important to revisit the initial motivations behind these early effortsand even try to recapture a bit of their naïveté and my initial enthusiasm for findinginnovative ways of expressing my scholarship. As I labor to become moresophisticated and skillful in my productions, it is important for me not to forget theinitial struggles and uncertainties that are documented by those earlier attempts. Thisis the reason behind another screening of “The One about Princess Margaret” heretoday.

Why was this particular medium chosen?

“The One about Princess Margaret”, like many of my early pieces, involvedbeing presented with a particular puzzle or challenge and then finding the tools fromthe arts to respond to such questions. In the case of “The One about PrincessMargaret”, it is important to recall that the production was built in PowerPoint—testing the software’s potential to its limits, then converted to video. My initial querywas: How can humor be used to capture time/place and culture and how will theresults measure up to scrutiny as auto-ethnography? Thus my personal leap intoauto-ethnography and the development of Performative Social Science (PSS) beganwith a research question.

I did not suddenly decide to transform into a graphic illustrator, scriptwriter orfilmmaker. I remain a social scientist with a particular story to tell or message to getacross by exploring which media will best help me to accomplish that. I don't worryabout whether I am exceptionally good at the use of a specific medium but rather,wonder if that means will serve the purpose at hand. I then begin the struggle with thespecific new means of communicating. This process itself holds many of the joys andfrustrations of each project, but also the opportunities to really explore the creativeprocess.

I believe that, on the whole, the writing up of our projects should be ancillary tothis new performative work; the text should never be the main output. For me, moreinteresting as documents are the scripts themselves, the notes or the diagrammaticevidence that our projects leave behind as a kind of trail, trace or map. When we dopublish, these sorts of records certainly hold more relevance for me. I am more andmore convinced these days that any academic written texts reporting our efforts atpopularizing research should be supporting ancillary documents to our productions,not the other way round and certainly not the final results or raison d’êtres of ourinvestigative efforts.

Many who have turned to PSS have shifted to the arts for both inspiration andpractical assistance in answer to our own frustrations with more standard research4practices. Perhaps typical qualitative academic methods have become shop worn(routinely slotting vast amounts of data into themes and then banging on about “rigor”comes to mind as an example)? Possibly the problem lies within our diffusion ofdata? Do we write too routinely about the “evocative” without knowing what it is thatis being evoked and how or, better yet, what our work might provoke instead? Yes,we turn elsewhere, aptly so. The arts encourage us to be at the forefront of change andinnovation in academia, challenging the status quo and moving our fields forward—the rightful place of scholarship.

What is Performative Social Science?

Is Performative Social Science art or social science? It isn’t either. It is a fusionof both, creating a new model where tools from the arts and humanities are exploredfor their utility in enriching the ways in which we research social science subjectsand/or disseminate or present our research to our audiences. This does not mean thatwe simply put on a play or make a film (and I need to constantly be wary of thatpitfall myself these days in lieu of the increasing amount of my own cinematicoutput).

It certainly isn’t taking interview transcriptions, leaving out a line or two hereand there, rearranging it on the page in stanza format mimicking poetry, and thenpassing it off as poetic inquiry. (Even worse: then calling ourselves poets.) It isn’tthinking that our lives are so precious and unique (the “snowflake” phenomenon) thatsurely the world wants us to dramatize them—too often through embarrassinglyintimate performances of over-cooked angst. Typically to a captured conferenceaudience, academics present these hysterics by crawling around the floor for half anhour and calling it dance or by producing a monologue that seems never to have anarrative arc or conclusion. As audience members, we often wish we had chosen theparallel book launch with complimentary sherry instead.

In its place, let us return to what we already know quite well: academic research.I recall the standard rule-of-thumb suggestion that we make to postgraduate studentsall of the time: “Find a research method that best fits the research question(s).” Thisimperative applies to PSS as well. Within the vast richness of the arts and humanities,which lens, device, technique or tradition might deepen our research process orexpand our dissemination plan? Is it a good fit (to the question[s])? Do weautomatically put on a play or make a film from our research data because we are somany frustrated actors or film directors, without ever asking which art form best fitsthe research question or the data that it has produced?

What lessons have been learned so far?

Funders are currently encouraging researchers to find ways to reach wideraudiences with their findings (“impact factor”) and, because of this, we are beginningto look beyond academic journals or narrow academic subject groups (e.g., delegatesat specialists’ conferences—or “preaching to the choir”). Funders now want to knowthe benefits of our research to society and how it might affect the social order–thepotential outcomes of our efforts.

Performative Social Science, when it is at its best and humming along, is asynthesis that provides answers to many of these very requirements. Ideally, ouraudiences should be almost unaware of the seams where we have cobbled together indepth,substantial scholarship with artistic endeavor. In my estimation, part of doingPSS is not only in the breaking down of the old boundaries, but also in discarding theold expectations and frameworks of what research is supposed to resemble after it isfinished.

Nonetheless, we are researchers. We are not actors, directors, filmmakers,dancers or poets. There are many opportunities and outlets (and frustrations androadblocks) for those who wish to pursue those professions. We can learn a great dealfrom these folks who often find it necessary to wait tables and do other menial jobs inorder to pursue their dream profession. They may help us look at our own fieldthrough new lenses, but let’s not insult them by falsely assuming their hard-earnedmantles.

In return, a word of caution to artists who might be drawn to working withresearchers: the world of academia is not simply a new venue for you to put on a play,dance a dance or publish a poem. There are both constraints and opportunities in theacademic world as well, which we are happy to share with you through ourcollaborations.

Through interfaces with both practitioners and practices from the arts andhumanities, opportunities are presented to work with social science material andexpand its means of production and popularization to novel and creative levels. Thisrequires the fusion mentioned earlier. This necessitates cooperation and collaboration.Communication and common ground are central to successful partnership and union.The intuitive aspects of shared culture, coupled with a more universal responseto life’s tribulations and injustices (and, therefore, artistic expressions of theseemotive components), compete for resolution with the more rigid academic ethicalframeworks and methodological constraints under discussion. By developing a trust ininstinct and intuition and the naturally expressive and moral potential of thesepersonal resources, social science research can become richer and more human, if weonly are willing to jettison some of the baggage of the old academic rigor and dryprocedural ethics.

A few closing words of caution: Some academics would rather incorporate thelanguage of what we are doing into their own outputs without ever challenging eithertheir own thinking or outputs. They subsume the language of PSS, but never really reexamine their own routine techniques or dissemination methods. Our developingterminology is, in this way, incorporated within standard academic journal texts ratherthan through any meaningful reinvention of research methods or diffusion.Most of all, however, let’s be careful not to implode PSS through an overblownsense of what we are about. In our enthusiasm, let’s not be too quick to anointourselves as poets, actors, dancers or magicians. If we do eventually earn those titles,I am sure that others more qualified to judge will be sure to let us know.

No comments:

Post a Comment

'Kip Jones brings the genre of what he calls performative social sciences forward with wide-ranging theoretical, academic, and artistic products in a various media that takes up how social scientists can use art for investigation and dissemination.'

About Me

I am an expert in biographic narrative intperpretive method and performative social science.

My greatest strength is my ability to get people involved—even excited—about the possibilities of creative human interactions, knowledge-sharing and the potential of qualitative social science endeavours.

An American by birth, I have been studying and working in the UK for the past 15 years and travelling throughout Europe to learn and engage. Part of my work has involved developing tools from the arts and humanities for use by social scientists in dissemination of qualitative data.

Recognition

What they say at JISC:Kip’s blog, ‘KIPWORLD’, covers a wide range of topics from advice on writing a PhD thesis to insight into his creative process. He regularly uses his blog, Facebook and Twitter to share his research (with) others. Kip also contributes to the LSE Impact blog, LSE Review of Books, Discover Society, Sociological Imagination, Creative Quarter, The Creativity Post and the Bournemouth University Research Blog.

Creative Commons

Watch RUFUS STONE now!

Watch award-winning, research-based short biopic, RUFUS STONE live on the Internet.
“This film is as good as most Oscar-nominated shorts, and vastly superior to many. In my opinion, it is just about as good as a short film gets.” –Patricia Leavy, The Qualitative Report
Nominated for the AHRC Anniversary Prize for Research in Film, the Jury remarked:'Beautifully made, lyrical and moving and packs a complete narrative arc into its short span.'

5 Minutes with Kip Jones

Kip Jones at LSE Literary Fest

Kip Jones was a member of the panel at the LSE Review of Books hosted event as part of the 5th LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival, entitled, "Beyond the Book: new forms of academic communication". Kip spoke on “Performative Social Science: What it is and how it started” then joined the panel for a lively Q&A session. A podcast of the event is now available.